Fear of the other, protagonist of Muntadas' new production at MUN

The MUN presents the new production by artist Antoni Muntadas, the result of his participation in the Tender Puentes artistic residency program. The exhibition "Other Fears", on view until February 8, brings together his new audiovisual production, entitled "Between Fears" (2022-2025), with a selection of previous works on the same theme: video works and graphic interventions that propose different approaches to different types of fears. Visitors will enter an immersive video installation that will allow them to "tread" the route of the Sanfermines running of the bulls and walk under the Pamplona sky, enveloped in sounds that complete the experience. I draw from sociological and anthropological experiences," says Muntadas. -Art for me is interdisciplinary.

Today, Wednesday, October 15 at 7 p.m., there will be a masterclass with the artist and the curator -BartomeuMarí-, free access by collecting an invitation on the website or at the box office. It will be followed by the inauguration of the space. Throughout 2025, the visit to the MUN is free on the occasion of its tenth anniversary and thanks to the collaboration of the City Council of Pamplona. 

The "uses" of fear

The newly created audiovisual work presented in the exhibition ("Entre Miedos", 2022-2025) is part of a project that seeks to analyze how Western societies have come to use fear as one of the main political instruments since the beginning of the 21st century. Muntadas explores how it acts, what are the consequences, the uses made of it when individual fears become collective feelings. "I have been seeing this situation since the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001; how politics has been appropriating this use of fear," he explains. This is thus approached as a series of emotions that influence the formation of ideologies, replacing rational arguments or debates of ideas. "Fear involves very complex emotions," he points out, and highlights the fact that we experience it as children, passing through the fear of decision making in adolescence, among other moments of life.

The Sanfermines are the setting for this exploration by the Catalan artist. "I wanted to revisit them and see that this relationship between the runner and the bull" produces a fear linked "with the fear of the other," he shares. "I wanted to dissect it and make it emotional and personal, beyond the epic spread by Hemingway," in what he defines as "a very specific situation emotionally." "Entre miedos" extracts visual and auditory elements of the festivity, and is structured in two projections: on the one hand, the floors of the streets traveled in the running of the bulls projected on the ground; and on the other, on the ceiling, the sky that covers the route, in which the crests of some buildings can be guessed. 

These images were also recorded at a very particular moment: Covid 19 and the confinement. "We all shut down and, here, in the silence, the Sanfermines were 'closed'," contextualizes Valentín Vallhonrat, collection advisor of the MUN. Muntadas saw it as an opportunity to develop this project linked to Navarre, to Pamplona, to the Museum," he says, and so he came to record the running of the bulls when no one was there: "The noise made by the silence in Pamplona when the Sanfermines were cancelled was deafening," Vallhonrat recalls. The absence of the running, the screams and, above all, the sound of a pulse that was fear", for a moment of uncertainty, of people falling ill or dying... And Muntadas documented this context "from an artistic language".

But the viewer can also listen to sounds recorded during the running of the bulls, interspersed with comments from people who participated in the race. "When the pandemic ended and the Sanfermines recovered, Muntadas returned to record the sound that was missing from that 'thunderous silence', that empty image," explains Vallhonrat. These sounds are of key importance, since, as the artist himself emphasizes, "we could almost follow the running of the bulls with our eyes closed".

On how to approach this installation, the author compares it to the way of being in an electronic music concert, in which the visitor can wander, "make it his own, find his place through the perception of each one". As summarized by the curator of the exhibition, Bartomeu Marí, it is "a thrilling work".

On the other hand, the rest of the pieces included in the exhibition "Other Fears" provide the visitor with a context for the reception and understanding of the new work, with a multidisciplinary perspective, as the curator points out: "Muntadas makes use of new means for artistic production, connected to the realities of the development of Western culture". Thus, the exhibition is completed with the television intervention projects "On Translation: Fear/Miedo" (2005), on the border between Mexico and the United States, and "On Translation: Miedo/Jauf" (2007), on the Strait of Gibraltar. It includes "Alphaville e outros" (2011), a video based in Alphaville, a "walled" residential neighborhood in São Paulo, Brazil, which speaks of exclusion resulting from fear in the search for security and well-being. "The Construction of Fear" (2008 - 2025) displays on a mural headlines that appeared in the months prior to the inauguration in the local and national press that include the word "fear" and synonyms. While "Fear, Panic, Terror" (2011) refers to how the publishing industry has made fear a literary genre of great popular success.  

This brings to 63 the number of exhibitions that the MUN has programmed in its first ten years of life, during which time 55 artistic residencies have taken place: 15 in the performing arts and music, and 40 in the visual arts. A large part of the latter correspond to the Tender Puentes program, in which artists generate new projects in dialogue with the MUN Collection, which contains 25,000 works of art (photography, painting, sculpture, video, installations...). Thus, the Museo Universidad de Navarra positions itself as a center of artistic creation and knowledge generation.

Vallhonrat also stresses the university character of the MUN as "part of its DNA". In fact, Muntadas has held a meeting with students of the Master in Curatorial Studies of the Museum, to share his career and "open their artistic processes so that they can be transited".